Sovereign Country – Most “countries” in Natural Earth control their own territory and affairs, don’t have far flung territorial holdings, and don’t have disputes with their neighbors. But things get complicated so there are a few other categories.

Country – Several semi-independent countries can form a single sovereign country (one is more dominant than the others). Example: Denmark and Greenland; also Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. See dependency below; where more powers have been devolved to the former dependency.

GeoUnit – Used for map labeling when a country has non-contiguous territories or 2+ top-level regions (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland in United Kingdom).

GeoSubUnit – Either used in similar way as GeoUnit when the country’s situation is complicated, or as a subdivision of GeoUnits. Example: USA with Alaska and Hawaii and Italy with Sardinia, Isole Pelagie, Pantelleria, and Sicily.

Dependency – Relics of the age of exploration and empire where the sovereign country still maintains presence. Examples: Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, Bermuda, and Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area.

Breakaway – Where the breakaway territory is nominally self-administering. Examples: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

Disputed – Two or more “countries” dispute who’s sovereignty reigns in a territory. Natural Earth uses de facto status to indicate who administers the area and who claims it (see note_brk). Example: Abu Musa Island (Admin. by Iran; Claimed by UAE).

Geo core – The part of a country (separate from the breakaway or disputed area).

Lease – The host country “leases” part of their territory to another for a period of time. Payment is not always exchanged or accepted. Example: Baykonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Overlay – When there is no formal lease but one country operates in another country’s territory or where part of international peace keeping operations. Example: Diego Garcia Naval Support Facility in British Indian Ocean Territory; Korean Demilitarized Zone (south and north), Korean islands under UN jurisdiction.

@Ronnie, There are several different flavors of SQLite, this file was created using GDAL / OGR, link here: http://www.gdal.org/ogr2ogr.html. Is there a direct SHP file to MySQL tool you can use instead?

That standard has been retired and it’s quite out of date with much of the rest of the world beyond the USA. Do you still use it? If so, why and what countries? Is there a better local coding system to use there instead?

The FIPS codes were half moved to the code_local field for the USA since they are still current via the US Census codes. Looks like they shouldn’t have the US prefix. Now for instance California is US06 where the 06 is the fips code. For Maryland this is US24.

I notice a separate issue where MD and VA aren’t dividing right on the DelMarVa peninsula, oops!

It should be possible to add them back in, but they seemed out of date and a hassle to make sure they were all in fact coded right and then some would always be missing since many adm-1 splits have occurred since the standard was withdrawn.

Local names are definitely a goal of this project, but it hasn’t been fully realized yet. Would love if you could help build this out!

name_par is for labeling places on a map like this:

name && “(” && name_par && “)”

Where && is the concatenation symbol in your scripting language.

name_alt is mostly targeted for use in disambiguation (eg: geocoding), but not for consistent display on a map. There can be multiple variants separated by comma , characters. There could be more logical sorting for this. But it’s more “you might remember this as / locals know this as”.

You also missed name_ascii which is where the plain ascii version of the name contents goes for better (simple) search support.